Category: Pastry

Hokkaido Milk Bread Recipe

This milk bread isn’t as sweet as many other recipes. If you like yours sweeter you can add up to 3 ounces of sugar to this basic formula. Note that I’m making twice the amount of tangzhong as I need, but it’s tough to make half of this without overcooking it, much less getting it all out of the pan!

For the Tangzhong

1.6 ounces (1/3 cup) bread flour
4 ounces (1/2 cup) water
4 ounces (1/2 cup) milk

Combine all the ingredients in a medium saucepan. Whisk the mixture over medium-low heat until “tracks” appear on the surface and it thickens noticeably. Set it aside to cool completely. Place plastic wrap over it to prevent a skin form forming. The tangzhong can be used immediately or up to two days later.

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Say it ain’t so, Joseph

Are most French restaurant meals purchased frozen and reheated in microwaves? That’s the incendiary charge leveled by Parisian restauranteur Xavier Denamur in last week’s European Times. If true, it would indicate that even French chefs aren’t immune to the pressures of time and cost. Dare I say that just because the meals are frozen it doesn’t mean they’re bad. The great Gaston Lenôtre pioneered the use of freezers in French cuisine. Of course it’s one thing to microwave food, it’s another to be less than forthcoming about it. Still I bet the typical frozen boeuf bourguignon beats the heck out of a Riblet dinner at Applebees!

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Watching Those Wishes

I’ve been working for some time to get more local projects so I don’t have to travel up to Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee as much as I’ve been doing the last few years. More time for parenting and blogging, donchaknow. As things turned out, I did succeed in getting work outside of the Upper Midwest: […]

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And anyway, if you’re going to eat a sandwich…

…it might as well be on a tender bread. I remember back in the 80’s when fashionable cafés first tried to dress up sandwiches by putting them on baguettes. It wasn’t a bad idea in principle, baguettes are good bread. The problem was that in order to tear off a bite you had to clamp down hard with your teeth on one end of the sandwich and yank with both hands from the other. Depending on how thick the crust was, when the bite finally released you’d send your plate, cutlery and water glass flying.

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On Bread Aesthetics

Several comments from readers expressing amazement that the tangzhong method isn’t more widely known. If this method really does all these amazing things, why don’t more bakers in America employ it?

All I can say is that it’s a matter of aesthetics. Crusty, chewy breads with elastic, uneven crumbs have been all the rage for almost twenty years now. At least in America, where a romance for Old World peasant breads runs very deep.

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On Chocolate Macarons

Reader and macaron lover Susan writes:

Hi, Joe. I am obsessed with making macarons. I have tried hundreds of recipes and yours is the only recipe that consistently produces perfect macarons. I’m attempting to make chocolate macarons. When I add in cocoa powder, do I then reduce the amount of powdered sugar that your macaron recipe calls for so the ratio of almond flour and powdered sugar remain 3.8:7.0?

I’m very pleased that the recipe is working so well for you, Susan. That’s an excellent question about the cocoa powder…a little too good, actually. The main problem you’re going to have with cocoa powder is the fact that it’s so absorbent. It’s going to soak up a good deal of water from the egg whites. Currently the recipe calls for about

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Lightning Strike to Chicago

I blew town Friday for a quickie trip back home, hence the radio silence. The good news is that I scored a ten-pound box of Vienna Beef hot dogs which should see the Pastry family through the grilling season. The bad news: Mrs. Pastry bought a new tarantula. If you met Mrs. Pastry you’d never peg her for an arachnophile. However she’s owned a spider consistently since her days in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, where she learned to love the things. I can’t say I understand how that happens to a person. Maybe it’s all the time in the Caribbean sun. Her last spider, Spanky, died over the winter. She’s been quietly mourning him ever since. But now

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So what is the tangzhong method?

Anyone who’s ever made a pudding cake has, for all intents and purposes, employed the tangzhong method. It’s the same basic idea: you add a pre-prepared starch gel to your batter/dough and what you get in return is a finished product that’s higher and lighter than it would otherwise be, that retains more moisture and that has a very tight and even crumb. The big difference of course that in a tangzhong (essentially “soup starter” in Chinese) there’s no sugar or flavorings in the mix — just flour and water combined at a ratio of 1-5 and cooked to roughly 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

But then what does the tangzhong gel do in the bread dough? It’s a very good question since baked bread is already a starch gel to some extent. But let’s back up a bit. Flour (white flour) as you’ll recall is nothing more than the finely ground endosperm of the wheat berry. Think of the endosperm as a dense pack of very long and stringy starch molecules all packed in together. Grind it and you get endosperm granules, which I think of as tightly bound bundles of sticks.

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Who Knew?

Today in Murcia it’s Murcian Meat Pie Day. Who knew there was such a thing? I guess the Murcians, who evidently found my recent posts on the subject via Google search. (And the internet grand?). So I’m told they consumed 10,000 meat pies and washed them down with plenty of beer, which is my idea of a festival. Wish I’d been there to see it. Oh well — next year in Murcia!

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